Some years ago I tried to figure out whether there was some kind of
mechanism that kept the community sizes at a fixed level. Taking the
population in countries that spoke a specific language, adjusting for
access to internet, and family sizes, made me realize that most stable
projects have 0.2–0.4 ‰ contributors within a normalized language group. If
you then say a stable community consists of 10-20 users, then this creates
a pretty hard limit on the language size. A community of 10-20 users would
imply a language size of 250–1000 000 people. That makes a
Wikipedia-project out of reach for a lot of languages.
(If you somehow limit this group, for example by demanding that only
trained medics should write medical articles, then you draw those medics
from the already limited set, in effect demanding an even larger language
group to make a working community.)
To create the initial interest to make a core encyclopedia is even more
difficult. To bridge that gap, and initiate building of a sustainable
community, a core set of articles are necessary. Perhaps that core set will
be short-lived, and will be replaced with articles that somehow better
reflects the user basis at the local language, but a core set that reflects
some common ground is nonetheless necessary. The capitol of Sweden doesn't
magically disappears in Bengali. The moon doesn't magically turns into
cheese unless in a fairy tale. There are some universal constants that all
languages must adhere to, even in Sicilian Wikipedia a mafioso is a mobster
[1] (someone have messed up the interlinking)
In Norwegian Bokmål we have a few users that has this kind of weird idea
that if something lacks an explicit name, either a word or phrase, then it
should not be described. In my opinion that is nonsense. Some kind of
entity can be described, in any language, no matter if it has a name. We
describe the World as we know it, using words or phrases from the language
to do so. If what we describe has a name, then we use that name. In some
languages that means describing a specific entity is difficult because the
local language has many words and phrases for the same thing. In some other
language it might be difficult because there are no word or phrases to
describe the entity. Neither of those problems arise because the entity is
non-existing in our world, it is just difficult to describe in the specific
language.
Give people knowledge! If they need to somehow clarify that knowledge to
make it more accessible to them, then let them do that! That is why
Wikipedia is editable for everyone!
[1]
On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
I'll start by saying that I'm one of the
developers of Content Translation,
so I'm obviously biased about this topic.
A lot of good points were raised here, but there's one that is not really
mentioned. If it sounds obvious to you, it's great, but it's not obvious to
everyone. Here it is:
More successful Wikipedia projects tend to be in languages in which there
is an established history and tradition of:
* elementary and higher education where teachers and professors speak to
students in that language, and in which students write papers in that
language
* publishing textbooks
* publishing encyclopedias
* publishing dictionaries
* translating works from (any) other languages, both fiction and reference
People who can read in these developed languages should remember this
privilege that they have: English, French, Russian, Spanish, German,
Polish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Japanese, Norwegian, Hebrew and a few other
well-developed Wikipedias are written in languages in which good
encyclopedias had already existed before Wikipedia came along. A Wikipedia
in these languages didn't make encyclopedic knowledge available in these
languages; it made encyclopedic knowledge *more easily* available in them.
There are many other things that (probably) affect the development of a
Wikipedia, such as web connectivity; speakers' population; speakers'
attitude to the language; work week length (and the remaining free time);
volunteering culture (or lack thereof); support of common operating systems
for the language; economic indicators like GDP and HDI in the countries
where the language is spoken; etc. I'm not aware of research that checks
the correlation between these aspects and the development of a Wikipedia
project in a language, but I strongly suspect that it exists for at least
some of the above. (If anybody reading this is aware of such research, I'll
be very happy to read it.)
But it's important to go back to the first point here: The existence of
previous encyclopedias makes it easier for writers in these languages to
simply start writing. "An encyclopedia" is not a new concept for them. The
culture around these languages already had well-developed scientific
terminology and a language style.
When I speak to people who write in Wikipedia in languages of India,
Philippines, and other developing countries, they complain about different
things from people that write in European languages. For example, they very
often complain about the difficulty of writing in an encyclopedic style and
bridging the colloquial language that common people can read and the
standardized versions of the respective languages. This makes me think that
they were standardized in a way that is problematic for *actually* writing
an encyclopedia that would be useful to the general public.
A *massive* project for writing in a language, would create a critical mass
of people who would either make the general public accustomed to reading in
this standard language, or create a new de facto standard. But I guess that
none of the current Wikipedia projects in these languages have this
critical mass of writers.
A translation project, such as what Jon Erling Blad and Lane Rasberry are
suggesting in this thread *may* create such a critical mass. It also needs
bold leaders, who will take it upon themselves Languages that are developed
today went through periods of directed development in the past; Lomonosov
did it for Russian, Diderot did it for French, and so on. This can happen
today as well. (English went through this, too, although I'm not sure which
person should be tied to it: Isaac Newton? Samuel Johnson? John Harris
(Q562265)? Alfred the Great? Probably all of them to some degree.)
I'd even go further and say that I don't agree with Lane when he says that
the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. It sounds like a given thing
to some people, but it isn't. Quite the contrary; it's imaginable that a
careful and thoughtful project of this nature can be carried out by the WMF
itself. "WMF never does this" is not a rule, and it must not be a mental
blocker. I increasingly feel that the WMF is gradually, increasingly
understanding that different languages need different kinds of resources
and support, and this may include paid content creation. (Before you jump
to conclusions: I'm a WMF staff member, but please don't understand from
this that I know about some internal project to do such a thing, or that I
am suggesting to do this. Neither thing is true. I'm just writing a sincere
stream of consciousness about my opinions and feelings, and I might be
wrong about it all.)
That said, it does make more sense to me that organizations other than the
WMF should lead such work, perhaps with some WMF funding, for the sake of
thought diversity if for nothing else. But whether it's paid for by the WMF
directly, by Wikimedia chapters, by thematic interest groups, or by
somebody else is not the main issue. What is important, is that *local*
people and native speakers are as involved as possible in the content
creation, and that the list of topics to be translated is not too strongly
dictated.
(I also like the suggestion of translating from different languages. For
practical reasons, English is the most common translation source [1], but
translating from French, Russian, Chinese, or other languages, is awesome
for diversity—not just politically, but philosophically as well.)
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CXStats
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2018-02-24 14:51 GMT+02:00 John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>om>:
This discussion is going to be fun! =D
A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the
thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].
Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
$1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those
articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.
I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only
translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles,
that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.
A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would
identify our inherit bias?
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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